28 Oct Symbol blockchain news update – 29/10/21
Hi everyone and welcome to Friday’s edition of the Symbol Blog update. So glad it is nearly the weekend! I have been really ill this week so apologies for the patchiness of the posts. Not sure if I have flu or am dying a slow and painful death but I am pretty sure that they are weaponising germs at my son’s nursery and testing them on unsuspecting parents. I don’t think that I ever had a fever continuously for 5 days. Wondering if my body temperature will ever drop below 39C again. Whatever my son brought home makes my brush with COVID earlier in the year look like a walk in the park 😭
Anyway, as you can tell I am feeling sorry for myself! 😁 Hopefully I will be on the mend soon and I should definitely get on with today’s post. Weirdly I don’t feel like I missed much yesterday but at some point very soon I am sure that all hell will break loose and I will have some long blog posts to write. If you’re reading Hatchet (am I still delirious from the fever or are you now known as “Mr Hatchet”?) I am going to keep bugging you for your post for the blog too 😉
Time to exit
Edit: I just realised I had inadvertently used a Brexit slogan “taking back control” as the original title – I feel disgusted with myself. Had to change it..
I still don’t know if anything has been said officially but after Hatchet’s comments on “voice and exit” which I reported on in the last update and gimre’s not so subtle picture of a fork 😂 I am going to put 2 and 2 together and say that the Trust issues will be resolved once and for all and soon. I am sure that it is battle stations in XYM City at the moment and everyone is incredibly busy but hopefully we will hear more soon on the situation. Of course I may have misread these, incredibly subtle 😆, clues from the captains and perhaps got this completely wrong 🤷♂️. I will be here to do my public service announcements as and when needed..
Out of interest did anyone solve this?
I was going to have a go but really couldn’t bring myself to sit in front of a computer and use my brain when I saw it (I am struggling staring at a screen now but I think my brain is on autopilot so it’s cool). I am guessing that it was the image of the fork in the previous tweet above? If not then I am still curious and will give it a go. I will get there but writing any simple piece of code outside of my go to ancient language Perl (which I am also now as rusty as hell with) takes me literally hours so please if you already did this let me know so I don’t have to torture myself and feel inadequate in the process 😁
Science meets blockchain with NFT-Drive
Science is my day job and I know that traceability and reproducibility are critical to scientific research. I saw this post and was intrigued because the project is using NFT-Drive to store critical data on the blockchain. As the authors report in their article there are inherent risks with having a single paper copy of important data – it is a huge no no in my book, never do this! I guess having a digital copy and backing it up somewhere safe is always the better option but what better place to do that than preserving it on the Symbol blockchain using NFT-Drive? Here they have stored 14 PDFs on chain costing a total of 822 testnet XYM. I guess this is a pretty simple application but it shows that NFT-Drive is not just for pretty pictures and any type of data can be stored using the technology.
I don’t think that it would be any good for my datasets as each sample is generally tens or hundreds of GB in size – this is an interesting read showing the scale of the issue in genomics. But I think that there are other applications in the scientific world that could benefit. Perhaps storing original image data from e.g. blots or microscopy, spreadsheets, plots and other supplementary data that you might submit to a journal when you publish a paper could be done on the blockchain. There is nothing worse than trying to get hold of original data and going to the journal website to find that there is a broken link or it is for some reason no longer accessible. Often emailing the original authors is no good as the research was done a long time ago or they just don’t reply. (we like to think that we are busy people 😆). I guess having long term decentralised storage could be something that would have real benefits in the scientific world.
I keep trying to think of the killer idea that brings my job and my passion together but so far it eludes me.. One day I will get that flash of inspiration..
Symbol fashion
We reported on the story earlier in the month but it looks like Zoi Zoi have revealed that they will be selling this T-shirt at the LOHAS Festa – I think it starts today! The shirt features a bear and a wolf with Symbol tattoos on bodyboards. I wonder where they got inspiration for the Symbol themed bear and wolf? 🤔 😁 Apparently the back of the tee shows the morse code for “Symbol” and “Zoi Zoi”. I love it – why can I never buy any of this cool stuff? I need to go on a Symbol shopping spree next time I am in Japan..
The mightiest tweeter of all 🦾
A modern day update on the famous quote ‘the pen is mightier than the sword” for you 😁 Tretso is an absolute tweeting machine and a huge asset to Symbol. I struggle to understand all of his posts but hopefully machine translation will continue to improve and unpick some of the subtleties of the Japanese language for me.
I agree with this sentiment and we have an army on Twitter in Japan – Symbol Blog is here to back you up 🦾
Symbol payments
The popularity of Symbol payments is increasing and now there is an official event (I think it is a food and drink festival) in Yokohama on November 3rd which will according to Radio some stalls will accept payment in XYM. Great to see this taking off, it started with a trickle of places but I feel like pretty much every day there is a new venue or event in Japan that is embracing XYM. Wake up rest of the world – you are missing out!
Thanks
Thanks for reading, it has just turned midnight here so it is officially Friday(!) I guess most of my readers are probably on their morning commute already being 8 hours ahead – have a good day and we will be back soon with another update!
I’m a Symbol and NEM enthusiast and run this blog to try to grow awareness of the platform in the English-speaking world. If you have any Symbol news you would like me to report on or you have an article that you would like to publish then please let me know!
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